Breakfast Topic: Do you consider WoW a hobby?
Do you find yourself defending (or hiding) the time and effort you put into WoW from family members, friends, or coworkers? If you've ever found yourself backed into that grungy little conversational corner (leagues from the more splendid type of corner shown above), it's almost guaranteed that whoever you're talking with has never stopped to consider your gaming as a bona fide hobby.
We've all used the bowling league analogy when trying to explain to people why it's important that we reliably show up on Thursday raid nights when our 24 other guildmates are expecting us. WoW's part of our social life. We love to read about it, putter and plot and theorize about it, dip into it for 15 minutes before dinner or plunge into it for hours on a weekend. It's a hobby -- get it?
But despite your presence here at WoW Insider, maybe you still don't consider WoW to be a hobby. Some players consume games (even MMOs like WoW) more like they would a favorite TV series -- worth making an effort to catch, sure, but not the end of the world when a hot date or something else interesting bumps it. Maybe watching TV makes for an odd example, since vegging out in classic couch potato fashion can easily devour more time and attention than WoW yet rarely gets elevated to hobby status. What about something like knitting? Do you devote the same time and attention to raid nights as your significant other does to knit nights, yet find that only one of those activities gets considered a "hobby"? What's the difference?
So what about you: Do you consider WoW a bona fide hobby or merely something you do?
